Your bio is often the first place a potential student will meet you. Sitting down and writing, or re-writing your bio can be a shoulder-slumping chore to labor through, but a well-crafted narrative about what you offer can become an indispensable tool for speaking to your future students. Your bio serves a few different purposes.

Establishing your tone, personality, and teaching style.

Positioning you and your experience within the landscape of your industry

Writing Your Yoga/Fitness Bio

You are often offered precious little real estate to present yourself as the stunning diamond of ingenuity that you are. Your professional bio (especially for trainers and yoga teachers) is almost akin to an online dating profile. You need to frame yourself in flattering lighting, but don't photoshop too heavily. Flaws can be your best asset, humor and syntactical intelligence can separate you from the sea of other choices. Keep your narrative a sharp and effective tool for promoting your services, brand and unique skills. Keep the following in mind.

Don’t be too verbose. This isn’t your memoir.

Granted, if you get good enough at what you do, publishers may come calling, but your bio isn’t the place to unpack your entire life. Sedulously avoid prolixity! What feels like fluff? Read your work, decided what is redundant, obvious or repetitive and mercilessly CUT IT. Editing is as much an art as creating. Make sure your certifications, special trainings and continuing education have a place of honor. One option is to weave them into the body of the bio, and then reiterate them in a bulleted list at the end.

Avoiding Clichés

You have limited room to explore any linguistic acrobatics, so throw a round-off in among the cartwheels. Here are some all too common turns of phrase that you can do without:

"Life-long athlete." Replace "athlete" with any other word, including "cat-lover" or "flamingo massage therapist" and it is still questionable, boring and suspect at best. Say it another way.

Any use of the word “facet”. Just stop.

"It was my dream to" Say it again, use different words.

"I have always" Have you? Be specific, this is a throwaway.

"Fitness is a lifestyle" Yes, we know. You can do better. Do better.

Being "addicted" or "obsessed" with whatever it is you're teaching- Just be dedicated. Those words are overused and vaguely problematic.

Don’t repeat key words. Use a thesaurus. Find another way to say what you need to say. You probably wouldn't put the same song twice on a playlist.

What Do You Do Differently?

Rather than explaining the basics of your service, get specific. Are you known for a particular breed of lunge? Are you a chaturanga connoisseur? Are your playlists often besotted with Taiwanese feminists folk singers/dubstep?
Take a moment to reveal the hemline of your flaws, your struggles, your humanity. It goes a long way in making your profile relatable, and often draws the reader in. Many readers want to know that you are, in fact, a mortal. If you are a gorgeous hyper-mobile, super ripped athlete that's wonderful, but also let us know about your journey. Readers are hungry to know that they might one day aspire to follow in your footsteps, but they have to know you weren't born that way. A bio that is without a little grit is an unassailable fortress, you leave your readers with nothing but a sense that you aren't a real person, that you are manufactured, and closed. You need to be at least a bit open, available and vulnerable so folks can look in and find a bit of themselves. If your story rings any bell in the reader's heart, they will check out your class. It's about your students feeling invited, and safe in your story and in your class.

What’s at Stake?

Where’s the fire? What makes what you offer essential to your target audience? What makes you the unflinchingly obvious choice for your potential clients? You should know the answer to this, before you start writing. It will drive the heart of your narrative on a cellular level.

Thank/Acknowledge Your Teachers

BUT not like you are accepting an award. Just graciously acknowledge where your wealth of edification springs from. Don't name more than 3-4. It starts to dilute the potency.

Talk to Your Potential Students

Know who they are. Who do you imagine you are speaking to?

How do you want them to feel? What will they take from your class?

Discuss tangible, and abstract deliverables.

Edit

Write how you speak(ish). Read your work out loud, maybe not in public, but definitely out loud. You'll hear any awkwardness or clunkiness and be able to clean it up.
Send it to a brutal friend. The one that sees flaws in puppies. Don't send it to all your friends, just one or two. Avoid too many cooks in the kitchen.

Find Out How We Can Help

You can always send us your current bio, and we can do all of this for you. We'll clean it up, and even help you edit so you have a long form and short form bio at the ready to send to studios. We're quite passionate about helping you refine your content and then getting your story out there. It's all about connecting with your students.

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I'm the patientMoon Content Crafter – sweeping in to save the day with writing and editing your site content to help get your message crystal clear for your students and clients. I also write widely on health and wellness industry issues, teach yoga in Boston, and received my MFA in writing and literature from Bennington.